Existing work on mutual fund performance persistence has obtained diverse results, depending on the group of funds studied. We examine whether performance persistence within a peer group of competing mutual funds depends on the group's composition. The UK mutual fund industry is ideal for such...

Gruber (1996) and Zheng (1999) report that investors channel money towards mutual funds that subsequently perform well. Sapp and Tiwari (2004) find that this smart money effect no longer holds after controlling for stock return momentum. While prior work uses quarterly U.S. data, we employ a...

Existing work on mutual fund performance persistence obtains diverse results, depending on the group of funds studied. We examine whether performance persistence within a peer group of competing mutual funds depends on the group's composition. The UK mutual fund industry is ideal for such an...

In the extensive debate about investment professionals' ability to add value, there has been scant evidence on the role played by industry expertise. To shed light on this issue, we study own-industry investing. Specifically, we analyze how well individual mutual funds as well as mutual fund...

Dichev [2007. American Economic Review 97, 386-401], in an influential paper, examines the gap between the performance of major stock markets and the dollar-weighted performance of investors in these markets. He finds a significant gap of 1.3 percent per year for NYSE/AMEX and 1.5 percent...

Using data on the universe of US-based mutual funds, we find that two out of five fund families hold corporate bonds of firms in which they also own an equity stake. We show that the greater the fraction of debt a fund family holds in a given firm, the greater its propensity to vote in line with...

We study how culture influences mutual funds around the world. Uncertainty Avoidance (UA), which is related to ambiguity aversion, is negatively associated with flow-performance sensitivity, deviation from the fund benchmark, fund alpha, and the fraction of active management across the 25...

The financial sector is unique in being largely self-governed: the majority of financial firms' shares are held by other financial institutions. This raises the possibility that monitoring of financial firms is especially undermined by conflicts of interest due to personal and professional links...

Previous papers that test whether sentiment is useful for predicting volatility ignore whether lagged returns information might also be useful for this purpose. By doing so, these papers potentially overestimate the role of sentiment in predicting volatility. In this paper we test whether...